Terese
Gagnon is a PhD Candidate in anthropology at Syracuse University. Her
ethnographic research traces the co-movement of Karen refugees with their
plants and agricultural practices across landscapes of exile and return: from a
refugee camp, to a third-country resettlement site, and back to Karen
homelands. She explores more-than-human collective memory and the ways that
Karen individuals' embodied engagements with plants—such as cultivation,
foraging and cooking—emerge differently within these various spaces. Utilizing
in-depth interview and participant observation methods, she asks: when
homelands are burned and people displaced, what become the conduits of
collective memory? How do the distinct socio-material constraints and
affordances of these spaces affect Karen human-plant relationships? And how
might the performance of “affective economy" shift across spaces of home,
exile and (sometimes) return?